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Post by Infinity Blade on Jun 7, 2016 6:42:15 GMT 5
Just today I was watching an episode of Paleoworld. Now, you may be thinking, "you can stop right there" (as Paleoworld is an old show), but the episode in question mentioned oreodonts and their biology. It claimed that, instead of being herd-traveling, sheep-like ruminants, oreodonts were actually burrowing animals occupying a similar ecological niche as modern prairie dogs. I decided to look this up online to see if there was anything refuting this proposal. Instead, (although I may not have looked hard enough), the only info I could find on the matter either supported it (like here; this is by the same man who put forward the burrowing oreodont hypotheis in Paleoworld, Dr. Kent Sundell) or at least did not contradict it. So were oreodonts really the prairie dogs of the Oligocene? Or is there anything refuting this hypothesis? Were some oreodont taxa better at it than others?
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Post by Infinity Blade on Jun 10, 2016 5:53:23 GMT 5
Some oreodonts were apparently quite large. Would it even be possible for such large animals to really burrow? I guess that falls under my question of whether some oreodonts were more specialized for burrowing than others.
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